


Shoot the Core

by steveelotaku



Category: Original Work
Genre: Birth, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Cheating, Cyborgs, Deconstruction, Dubious Consent, F/M, Freudian Elements, Gen, Genocide, Horror, Psychological Horror, Shmup, Transhumanism, Video & Computer Games, earth all along, sex and violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-22
Updated: 2019-03-22
Packaged: 2019-11-27 12:56:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18194882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steveelotaku/pseuds/steveelotaku
Summary: The earth is under attack by the Gavina Empire, and only the pilot of the Thunder Gun is capable of stopping them...(Massive Spoilers in tags)--A deconstruction of the shmup genre I played way too much of as a kid. There's a LOT of commentary in here, some of it more subtle than others. Let's just say I have a lot of issues with the idea of games as power fantasy.





	Shoot the Core

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this two years ago for a scifi webzine and was narrowly cut. I figured I'd share it with you--if you grew up playing Gradius, R-Type, Raiden, 1942, anything like that, this might be up your alley. Or not.
> 
> Fair warning--this is dark. Seriously dark. If body horror and commentary on sex and violence's interlaced relationship in our society isn't for you, look elsewhere.

In terms of air superiority, there are few better projects developed by the Federal Reserve Earth United Defense Corporation than the 529/1985-KNM Thunder Gun strike fighter.  Few other projects I’ve flown can ever match it.  Sure, there was the old Neo P-38, which was good for doing loops over the horizon, and had bomb power like nobody’s business, and there was the pretty experimental Bio-Ship, which had _organic_ weaponry, pleased the vegan crowd like you wouldn’t believe, but it had the slight problem of literally growing on you.  By the time you finished repelling invaders, you probably had at least one UTI and a bad case of moss growing on your shoulder.

                No, the Thunder Gun is everything you’d want in a strike fighter.  Fires up to about 40 000 rounds a second (that is auto-replenishing solar powered laser ammo, mind), has a bomb powerful enough to melt enemy missiles and tear through armor like rice paper, and moves at Mach 5 with a whisper-quiet engine.  Of course, with the dimensionally-stabilized cockpit it can do an easy Mach 10, it’s just there’s no real need when you’re savouring the battle.

                When the War on Terror wound down, we all became thankful for the invasion of the Gavina Empire.  Alien bastards in big robots and tanks and flying crystal structures.  That’s why we got the Thunder Gun.  Reverse engineered from an old crystal we found on the moon, pretty soon we could take the aliens on their own terms.  A five-hundred-foot tall robot’s no match for steel-penetrating laser bolts, even if it can fire a beam the size of a city block from its hand, or has five hundred Gatling guns in its chest.

                I’m told we’ll beat the Gavinans any day now, but truth be told I don’t want the war to end.  We’re winning constantly.  Every day I wake up to the news to see another Gavinan ship fall, and see my name up there in lights blinking saying just how many of the creeps I’ve shot down.  My wife seems to be tired of the war, but I don’t understand.

                “Honey, this war’s been going on for too long.  I’ll be glad when the Emperor himself falls.  Maybe then we can rebuild the earth…this is no place to raise a child.”

                I give her a warm smile.

                “Our kid’s gonna turn out just fine,” I reassure her.  “This war’s good for us.  The more we fight, the stronger we’ll get.  Then we’ll have a great world where we’re better than anything the enemy can throw at us.  I can dodge bullets, you know?  Imagine, seeing our child on their bicycle, dodging flies with a fraction of a second’s timing.  Imagine them playing basketball, moving like a blur.  I tell you, the war with Gavina was the best thing that ever happened to us.  No more killing each other.  No more of this stupid competition between countries.  It’s us versus them at its ultimate.  A justifiable war—how often can you say that?”

                She shakes her head and goes back to reading.  I swear with every passing month, though, I feel less and less attracted to her.  She’s warm and loving, but she hasn’t got the right feel.  When I’m with her, I feel tense.  I feel guilty.  Every caress, every kiss, every kick of our beautiful Earth-born baby is telling me that I’m wrong, that this whole war’s a mistake.

                I can’t deal with that.  Who’d want to?  When you’re up in the Thunder Gun, flying a ton of American steel, tempered with the finest alien tech you could ever want, the accelerator humming, pounding between your legs, the joystick firmly grasped in your hand…why, it’s the best feeling you could ever have.

                I walk into the hangar later that day.  It’s just me—there’s never been a need for more pilots.  Sure, there’s a back-up squadron codenamed “P2”, but if you ask me, all they do is take the jobs people don’t want.  There’s no glory to being back-up.  What every man wants, from my experience, is their name at the top of the kill count list.  I fought hard, and I’m always at the top.  P2’s scores—every score below mine.

                Commander Mei Dofantaji salutes me as I walk in.  She’s always been there, always young and beautiful.  Her hair is a crimson red, tied back in pigtails.  She wears a suit jacket over a black miniskirt and tight white blouse.  I’ve always wondered why she never wears something more military, but I figure since she’s the commander of the best squadron in human history, she can do what she wants. 

                “Good afternoon, Red Ace,” she says, addressing me by my codename.  “I’ve got a special assignment for you.  Two, actually.  The first is a high-speed strike on the Gavina Air Fortress Nymphos.  The second, if you succeed, is to meet me in my office after for a…debriefing.”

                She giggles youthfully at her words, and smiles at me.

                “Gooood luck!” she says, giving me a thumbs up.

                I swear sometimes it’s hard to believe she’s real.  To be honest, I’d prefer her as my wife than the one I’ve got.  She just always praises me, never accuses me of being a glory hound.  She always appreciates what I do for the earth.

                “Remember,” she smiles, as I climb into the Thunder Gun’s cockpit.  “Shoot the core.”

                I always do.

                I fly off into the sun’s rays, thousands of miles into the air, floating above the ruins of cities destroyed by the Gavinans, soaring over mountains and rivers.  The world is so tiny from up here, and I’ve never felt so big.  Freedom, man.  That’s what it’s all about.  Freedom to fly where you want, kill what you want, be who you want to be.  I wanted to be the biggest badass in the skies, and everywhere I go, every restaurant, every train station, every airport and tiny little convenience store is showing _my_ kill count.

                I’m checking my scanners.  For some reason, they’re a little bit jumpy today.  I keep seeing **“Loop 1 Stage 1”** endlessly jittering in the corner, like an old, damaged CRT monitor.  They’re still picking up targets, though, and pretty soon I see my whole screen filled with Gavina fighters. 

                I remember fighting the old Gavina fighters.  They used to look pretty close to our own, so when we were still using F-22 Raptors and such, we’d have issues with blowing up our own men.  Friendly fire has ceased to be a problem now that we’re all doing solo missions, but even so, we changed our designs up, and so did they.

                The fighters now are these metal dolls, gigantic airships, and massive tanks.  They look like a futuristic mockery of the tools of earth, and that makes me hate the Gavina even more.  It’s not enough that they destroy us, they have to do it with our own devices, our own shapes that we made with our hands, our bodies.

                Air Fortress Nymphos comes in view, this giant winged V of a ship, covered entirely in lasers, chainguns, missile pods, and drone deploying hives.  Metal insects, hundreds of thousands, swarm around it as I fly in.  As my laser cannons and missiles chew through armored wasps and dragonflies, I fly towards an oval opening in the fortress’s hull.  The slender nose of my ship effortlessly slides into the narrow slit of the opening, my guns blazing as I fight through yet more and more tanks, jets, mechanized dolls, and robot insects.

                My eyes fill with electric ecstasy as I watch my kill counter rise.  The hum, the orgiastic hum of the engine and the feel of the throttle between my legs makes me surge with pleasure.  Dodging bullets and giving back thousands of my own into the pulsating, blinking mechanical womb of this Air Fortress is like music to my ears.  I watch my scanners spring to life, explosions and colors filling my eyes and ears.

                **Loop 1 Stage 2**

                **Loop 1 Stage 3**

                I see more and more of those little “Loop Stage” warnings, but I ignore them.  The tech isn’t for me to figure out.  As long as my guns blaze, that’s all that matters. 

                Then my eyes catch sight of something breathtaking. 

                Beneath all the hellish techno-organic workings of the Gavinan fortress, there, settled neatly at the bottom of the ship, is a verdant paradise.  A brilliant green meadow, filled with tiny houses and tiny moving dots which I can only assume from so high up are people…

                Earth hasn’t looked like that for a long time…

                For a moment, I just stop shooting.

                I think of my wife.  I think of my daughter.

                They’ll never know anything like this, if I’m honest with myself.  Earth is an industrial hellhole, a burnt-out wreck.  Once the weapons factories shut down, it’ll take forever to clean the earth once more and let it be reborn. 

                “Red Ace, keep firing!” calls out the voice of Commander Dofantaji.  “You can’t stop now!”

                She’s right.  I can’t. 

                “It’s a trick,” she says, smiling out from my monitor.  “You can’t seriously believe alien scum would keep around a nice piece of Earth, do you?  It’s no good to you.  It’s no good to them.”

                She giggles more, and that’s all the prompting I need.

                I drop every bomb I have.  I watch as the entire meadow burns, leaving behind countless skeletons and ruined houses.  I burn everything to ashes.  The entire Air Fortress begins to explode, and I shift my ship to Mach 5 to escape.

                There’s tight corners everywhere as I leave, and I hear the Commander whisper.

                “Faster, Red Ace…”

                Mach 6.

                “Faster.”

                Mach 7.

                “Faster, come on!  Show me how fast you can go!”

                Mach 8.

                “Almost there!”

                Mach 9.

                “Come on, don’t stop now!”

                Mach 10.

                She lets out a scream of ecstasy.

                “Congratulations, Red Ace!  You’ve destroyed those alien bastards.  Now come on back home.  You’ll need your debriefing.”

                It’s midnight by the time I’m back, and the Commander’s office is dimly lit.  She takes me over to her couch and pours celebratory drinks.  The taste of champagne stings my tongue as I lie back and let her stand over me.  Her hair is the color of blood in this light, and her sugar-sweet tone has darkened.

                “You’re the best, Red Ace,” she smiles, dropping her jacket.  “And I have a hero’s reward right here….”

                She unzips her skirt and spreads her legs, pulling me up towards her.  It’s only now that I’m so close to her that I’ve noticed something.  The Commander’s eyes.

                There’s no life in them.  There’s a faint, almost painted sparkle, but there’s no life to it.  Her skin is soft, but not like skin.  It doesn’t feel like my wife.  It feels…perfect, but in all the wrong ways…

                “Shoot the core,” she says.  “Shoot _my_ core.”

                She starts to caress me, and she slowly gives me drink after drink until I can’t even remember who I am or where I am.

                “I’m your mission now,” she says.  “Fill me up.  Fill this emptiness. Beat your high score.”

                And when she pins me down, I do.

                When I awaken in the morning, she’s not there waiting to give me a mission like she usually is.  The whole couch is covered in blood.  Her clothes are torn up and bits of wiring are lying all over the place.  I find her lower body lying nearby…

                It’s robotic.

                Looking inside, it’s Gavinan technology.  But that’s impossible, unless…

                My wife is in the room, clutching a smoking gun.  The severed head of Commander Mei Dofantaji is spouting “Game Over” endlessly.

                “You murdered them,” my wife says.  “You murdered them all, just for her.”

                “Murdered who?”  I wonder, but I know what she means.

                There never was a Gavinan empire.  Or if there was, she was the only member.  Commander Mei.  Mei Dofantaji.  That didn’t even sound like a name, did it?  She was supposed to be Japanese...

                But she never really was anything, was she?

                Mei Dofantaji.

                Meido fantaji.  That’s Japanese for…

                Maid Fantasy.  Made Fantasy. My god, she was never real.  None of this was.

                The dark screens surrounding the Commander’s office fall, and I look out over the ruined fortresses I’ve destroyed.

                They’re all shaped like the old continents, because that’s what they were, all except the last one.  We ran out of targets to fight over, so we turned on ourselves.  We needed a scapegoat, so we made one.  Countless innocents, sent into battle again, and again, forced to fight to comfort our own paranoia…

                My god…my god…

                My wife is still holding her gun.

                I don’t know if she intends to kill me.  I don’t.

                But it’s only when a splatter of blood appears on her stomach that I notice something’s wrong.

                I lie her down.

                The baby’s kicking.

                I hear tiny sounds, tiny whines and cries.

                From her stomach I can see a cut, and I pull it open.

                There, in the midst of her womb is my baby girl.

                She’s beautiful…bright blue eyes, bright blonde hair like the lightning…

                …and the most beautiful steel wings and Gatling guns emerging, blood-dripping, from her gentle body.  She begins to speak.  My wife lies there, comatose, a long trail of blood and oil pouring from her lip.

                “L—L—“

                “Y-yes?” I ask, not sure what to say.

                “ **Loop 2, Stage 1** ,” the baby girl says, her hair staining blood red, as Mei’s voice comes from her lips, her bright blue eyes darkening with the ashes and fires of a brand new war.


End file.
